<body>
	<h2 style="margin-top: 0px">Welcome to the Wings Portal</h2>

	<p>
		This portal provides access to the <b>Wings semantic workflow
			system</b> by allowing you to browse, set up, and run workflows. Some
		unique features of Wings that can assist a user include:
	</p>
	<ul>
		<li>Choosing datasets that are valid for a workflow you have
			selected, based on the metadata properties of the datasets and the
			semantic constraints of that workflow</li>
		<li>Setting parameter values that are appropriate for the
			datasets you have selected, based on the semantic constraints of the
			workflow steps</li>
		<li>Handling collections of data in a compact way, based on
			compact collection reasoning in the workflow templates</li>
		<li>Specializing abstract workflow steps, based on the
			constraints imposed by both datasets and other workflow steps</li>
	</ul>

	<p>
		You can walk through some <a
			href="http://www.wings-workflows.org/tutorial">Wings Tutorials
			and Videos</a> that guide you through the basics of creating and using
		workflows.
	</p>


	<h2>About Wings</h2>
	<p>
		Workflow systems can automate many aspects of workflow creation and
		execution. The WINGS workflow system developed at USC/ISI illustrates
		these capabilities, with WINGS providing user assistance and automatic
		workflow validation and generation. The WINGS portal is setup by
		default to run locally, but it can use different execution engines
		such as <a href="http://oodt.apache.org/">OODT</a> and <a
			href="http://pegasus.isi.edu">Pegasus</a>
	</p>

	<p>
		<b><a href="http://www.wings-workflows.org">WINGS (Workflow
				INstance Generation and Specialization)</a> uses AI planning and
			semantic reasoners</b> to assist users in creating workflows while
		validating that the workflows comply with the requirements of the
		software components and datasets. WINGS can reason about the
		constraints of the components and the characteristics of the data and
		propagate them through the workflow structure. WINGS reasons over <i>semantic
			workflow representations</i> that consist of both a traditional dataflow
		graph as well as a network of constraints on the data and components
		of the workflow.
	</p>

	<p>
		<b>Wings workflow repositories are available through other portal
			sites</b> installed for use of specific research groups. These
		collections include workflows for population genomics, for educational
		student assessment, and for social network analysis. Each of these
		sites contains datasets and the executable codes for all workflow
		steps in their collection, so the workflows can submitted for
		execution at the location where that particular Wings portal
		installation is set up.
	</p>

	<p>
		<b>The WINGS workflow system has an open modular design</b> and can be
		easily integrated with other existing workflow systems and execution
		frameworks to extend them with semantic reasoning capabilities. We
		have integrated the Wings semantic workflow system with other user
		interfaces, and submitted workflows with a variety of execution
		engines. WINGS is built on open web standards from the World Wide Web
		Consortium (W3C) such as the Web Ontology Language (OWL), the Resource
		Description Framework (RDF), and the SPARQL query language for RDF.
	</p>

	<p>
		If you are interested in using the Wings semantic workflow reasoners
		with your own workflow framework, or in setting up your own
		installation of a Wings workflow portal, please <a
			href="mailto:varunr@isi.edu">contact us</a>.
	</p>

	<p>
		Publications providing overviews and technical descriptions of how
		Wings works are available in the <a
			href="http://www.wings-workflows.org">Wings web site</a>.
	</p>
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